Il CREDS https://www.creds.ac.uk/ is a research centre established in 2018 with a vision to make the UK a leader in understanding the changes in energy demand needed for the transition to a secure and affordable, zero-carbon society.
The Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) published a paper indicating that although 5G technology is more power efficient than previous generations, total energy consumption by 5G networks may in fact rise.
This is partly because while 5G equipment is said to be anything up to 90 percent more efficient than 4G in terms of energy per unit of data traffic, anticipated future increases in the volume of traffic could cancel out any savings.
One of the points made in the report is that while the energy efficiency of mobile networks has increased with each new generation, so has the amount of data traffic being carried by mobile networks. CREDS cites figures from Ericsson that estimate global monthly mobile data traffic stood at 80 exabytes by the end of 2021, with a forecast that this will increase to 370 exabytes by the end of 2027. Are the advances in energy efficiency enough to cancel out such an increase, or will that lead to a higher overall power consumption?
Another factor is that improving the energy efficiency of networks will make data cheaper on a per-bit basis. Williams predicts this will make it economically viable for operators to make unlimited data contracts much more common. The combination of unlimited access to high-speed, low-latency data will enable more data-intensive services, and this will likely drive up network usage, in what the report calls a rebound effect.
The study by CREDS also points out that any assessments of the energy usage of 5G have almost exclusively focused on the operational energy required to power the mobile networks, and tended to neglect the embodied energy, which refers to the energy required to manufacture, install, and maintain the network infrastructure itself.
A historical estimate that embodied energy once accounted for 36 per cent of the total energy consumption of a base station over a 10-year lifetime is cited by the report. A more recent estimate suggests embodied emissions associated with a base station amount to 10-15 per cent of its operational emissions, over the same decade life span.
For handsets, the embodied energy situation is even worse, with the extraction of raw material and manufacturing phases accounting for around 75 per cent of the average carbon footprint of smartphones, according to one study.
The report offers a number of recommendations, the first of which is that more research is needed, and that funding bodies should support such work as a priority. The research should include peer-reviewed assessments of the effects of 5G on the energy consumption of mobile networks with better disclosure of the key data and assumptions used, CREDS adds.
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https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/03/report_casts_doubt_on_5g/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121012958